Running for Reconciliation

This past weekend, I completed a 5km run in support of the YIWCL’s Cree Women’s Cultural Camp at the University of Alberta. The cultural immersion camp recently lost its corporate sponsorship and is scrambling to find ways to finance their endeavours for creating safe spaces of empowerment and cultural reclamation for young Indigenous women. The run is but one of the many ways I am joining forces with organizers to get this cause back on its feet.

The run was easy, as was setting up the Go Fund Me page to garner donations from friends and family online. It is amazing how building a narrative about something online doesn’t seem real though, until your feet actually start hitting the pavement. It was at that point, when I could hear the crunch of my sneakers on the icy pavement, that I realized what I was doing.

So much of our current cultural climate is based around literacy – we live in a word-saturated universe of tweets, articles, diatribes and likes. So what happens when words turn into action? I could have easily just set up the Go Fund Me campaign and watched the money roll in without having to get up off my couch. What significance does running hold for this cause?

Running is a ritual of being-present, reflecting on one’s self and one’s presence in their temporal-spatial reality. I used to run all the time; I even used to call myself a runner. However, the combination of PTSD following birth trauma and a sedentary academic lifestyle in completing my Masters has put the brakes on my once-regular running ritual. When I got out there on the weekend, the pavement was covered with freshly fallen snow and my breath clouded in the space in front of my face. It felt like coming home again.

I realized that completing the action of running for my sisters was just as important as raising the money itself. In the process of moving my body through space in solidarity with my Indigenous sisters, I was engaging with my own relationship with reconciliation by contemplating the presence of my body in this space, on this land, on Treaty 6 territory, on a day when most people are celebrating the colonization (Thanksgiving). I was committing more than just my thoughts and vocabulary (albeit important things too!) to the narrative and cause of reconciliation. I was also committing my physical body and time to it. I was working for it.

For the next run on December 8th, I have 9 women who have pledged to join me in working for a better future together. We will run as a sisterhood for the cause of sisterhood, bringing about reconciliation through our actions one step at a time.

Nakita Valerio is an academic, activist and writer in the community. She is currently pursuing graduate studies in History and Islamic-Jewish Studies at the University of Alberta. Nakita was named one of the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation’s Top 30 under 30 for 2015, and is the recipient of the 2016 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as well as the Walter H. Johns Graduate Studies Fellowship. She has also been honoured with the State of Kuwait, the Queen Elizabeth II and the Frank W Peers Awards for Graduate Studies in 2015. She has been recognized by Rotary International with an Award for Excellence in Service to Humanity and has been named one of Edmonton’s “Difference Makers” for 2015 by the Edmonton Journal. Nakita is the co-founder of Bassma Primary School in El Attaouia, Morocco and the Vice President of External Affairs with the Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council.